Dear Nintendo, hi, it's me, Austin
And I'm here once again to take your cute, beloved franchise adored by millions,
And twist it until it's barely
Recognizable for both my own amusement and for the amusement of other cynical jerks out there like me
Recently, MatPat deduced that being a Pokemon trainer
Was the worst career move you could possibly make, and you know what?
He's totally right. The boring old workaday trainer job is not only grueling
It's just not freakin worth it
Amazingly though, in my own journey into the Pokemon universe
I discovered something that Mat missed. Something that honestly
I think we all missed. I didn't see a single comment in that video about this.
There is a secret loophole,
that if you're willing to forego the normal path of wearing holes in the bottom of your shoes walking miles
Down routes 1 through 17 in your quest to become the literal best
Pokemon trainer in the universe, only to be rewarded with enough
Change to buy yourself a victory dinner and a cheap hotel room for the night
*Deep Breaths*
You can become the richest person in the entire world in practically no time at all,
and destroy entire
Nations in the process, and in order to do that, you're gonna have to do one
Simple thing. get yourself a Pokemon that knows the move payday
Mat gets a pass from missing this move because, well for one thing it kind of misses the spirit of the Pokemon games
and the anime, which is to go on an adventure and
enslave sentient creatures and force them to fight each other to the death for your amusement and profit, but I actually discovered this
completely by accident. You see my original goal, the original video I was going to do was to figure out of all
728 Pokemon moves, which was the most dangerous and
damaging of them. And I got all the way down the list to move
to the six. Move six! Six entries in, and I'm already distracted!
I'm trying to figure things out, give the people the blood, gore and horror that they want out of the game meant for children,
and here I am
distracted by the jingling car keys of "Boy!
I just gotta know how much money you can make from payday!" For the purposes of this video
We're gonna use the figure MatPat uses
Where a hundred pokedollars is thirty nine cents in US currency
Which I did double check and seems to be on the level. Anyway, on with the show.
How much money can you make
using the move
payday?
For those of you who don't know, payday is a move learned almost
exclusively by the Pokemon Meowth or their evolutionary forms.
It's a physical normal type move where your Pokemon attacks your opponents by
literally throwing money at them.
As a nice bonus at the end of the battle, you get to pick up all the money from the ground and keep it!
Providing you wipe the blood and fur of the murder victim off of it first.
The way the amount is calculated is pretty simple
It's the level of your Pokemon times five per use. If you use it, three times the level five Meowth
That's 75 smackers use it once with the level 100 Meowth the boom five hundo right in the pocket all for the low low price
of a little bit of Pokemon PTSD
So basically on that little bit of information right there
you can see that the goal to making a buck would be to simply have the highest level Pokemon use payday the most in a
short amount of time right and for the sake of simplicity and to save room for later because I have a lot of info to
Get through today. Let's run through it like this
You take a level 100 Meowth through a high level like Poni Gauntlet and start running in circles
Let's say that you have the ability
Illuminate active, which doubles your encounter rate and let's say you were even smarter and equipped an amulet coin to double the money you earn
At the end of the battle, taking into account that each step takes exactly a fifth of a second
That means it'll be approximately one point zero seven seven (1.077) seconds on average until you encounter a wild Pokemon
Which will be around level 15-55
Boom! You two-shot it using payday the Pokemon dies without getting a chance to write home to his family. Since you're level 100 you
use Payday twice, that's two thousand big ones right there or
$7.80, and then you rinse and repeat this over and over and over again. Given that the average battle would last
approximately forty two point eight three seconds plus the average of one point zero seven seven seconds in between battles,
this means that you're earning a cool forty five point five four (45.54) Pokedollars or eighteen cents per second
That is a whopping ten dollars and sixty six cents per minutes or six hundred and thirty nine
Dollars and forty nine cents per hour. That is over twenty eight times
the average hourly wage in the United States according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics
That means if you work 8 hours a day
Nine-to-five murder-genociding helpless Pokemon five days a week for a whole year., you'll make a salary of--get this--over
1.3 million
dollars a year. Boom!
Suck on that, Elite Four! Instead of being the very best that no one ever was I'm just gonna sit around in luxurious
capitalist fashion and reap the fruits of my cute little cat's labor every day before going home to my glorious
McMansion. Like between being a nomad with aching feet and being a millionaire entrepreneur
I know which I would pick, but it doesn't stop there--oh, no--because
A business is not a business if it cannot be scaled up. So how do we scale this up?
well for that we're gonna have to turn to youtuber verily--verily...Verlisify? Verlisify.
Verlisifaius the third...? I don't know how to say it.
anyway, he figured out a way to twist and exploit the world of Pokemon for his own personal gain in a
Truly magnificent fashion using a combination of the Pokemon Smeargle, who can learn a move called sketch which allows him to copy any move
he wants in the SOS mechanic from ultra Sun and ultra moon allows you to build a pokemon with the moveset Roost, Payday,
Happy Hour, and False Swipe. Happy hour doubles the amount of reward money that you receive from a battle which combined with the amulet coin
Leads to a four times money payout, NOW WE'RE COOKIN' WITH GAS! Whereas these combined skills
allow you to maximize your payouts, Roost and False Swipe allow you to essentially prolong a battle for an eternity
Forcing your opponent to call for help every turn while you mercilessly pelt them with money, turning the game from a cute
visualization of cartoonish dogfighting into a sort of meat grinder simulator where you drop Pokemon in one end and pick
blood-soaked money out the other.
Eventually you reach a maximum payout of a hundred thousand Pokedollars or three hundred ninety bucks and the battle collector winnings and start the process
all over again
Now we know that these battles happen in real time because time in the Pokemon world
progresses at the exact same rate as our world, and amazingly this
Streamlined process bumps your salary from a still pretty impressive six hundred and thirty nine dollars and forty nine cents per hour to one
thousand two hundred and seventeen dollars and 64 cents per hour or
2.4 million dollars a year. That is quite the freaking stack of cash a
suspiciously high stack of cash. Which brings us back to what I mentioned earlier:
"-and destroy entire
nations in the process!" Those of you who know a thing or two about
Economics know that money doesn't come from nowhere.
And as far as I see it the move payday a move that remember involves throwing a literal, valid,
spendable currency at your opponent acquires its money in one of two ways.
Either A). It's a glorified printing press where whoever uses it is essentially pooping out fresh money on the fly
which means you're really gonna have to invest in some..
money laundering..?
Or B). It's teleporting valid currency from somewhere in the world into your pokemons hands. Essentially
glorified theft, which 'yikes.' Now,
I'm gonna be honest:
according to my calculations one person doing this would not negatively impact the economy one way or the other by all that much.
Although, I'm sure you would definitely raise some eyebrows over at the IRS.
But if the chaotic windfall of bitcoins has taught us anything
Where there's easy money to be made short-sighted people will come rushing from all corners of the globe
There's a 100% chance if this money-making scheme were discovered, it would not remain a secret and in order to figure out the
economic impact of this move,
we're gonna have to figure out how many people are using it across the entire world of Pokemon.
Now it's hard to tell exactly how many people would catch wise
But we can build an approximation from the very video that outlines this method as of this moment the money making guide by
Verlisify has 19 hundred likes on it, which is probably the closest estimate
we'll get for folk who are playing Ultra Sun and Moon that are using this method. Now
hold on to your butts because we're gonna use this one number:
One thousand, nine hundred...
and use it to blow your electrode.
So considering that at least 1900 people are presumably using this method to get rich in ultra Sun and Moon,
we need to figure out a few things; the population of the various Pokemon regions their gross domestic product or GDP,
which is economic shorthand for how much money this country is worth.
Although that's a bit reductive and it's incredibly difficult to know for certain how much money is in the world.
This is the closest thing to a real number we can use to estimate how big the giant pool of Pokedollars is. The Pokemon
canon is comprised of seven major regions- Kanto, Johto
Hoenn, Sinnoh, Unova, Kalos, and Alola. All of which are based off of real world locations almost to the exact layout
Kanto is the Kanto region of Japan, Johto is the Kansai region, Hoenn is the Kyushu
and Sinnoh is the Hokkaido region while Unova is New York and New Jersey and Kalos is France and Alola, of course, is Iceland.
I mean - Hawaii. Using the maps we have available, I overlaid them with the various regions our real world
they're based on the get estimates of their area, which we can use in conjunction with population densities to get an estimated population
Unova was the most difficult since the Hudson hack and saw and the East aren't perfectly aligned with a Unova while Alola was the easiest
since I could just copy and paste everything. Given the approximate population densities of each region
the Pokemon ones are based on and their square miles and kilometers
I determined that Kanto has a population of seven hundred and thirty eight thousand, Johto eight hundred ninety four thousand Hoenn nine hundred and eighty
seven thousand Sinnoh 1.3 million, Innova
8.7 million Kalos five hundred forty-seven thousand and Aloha eight hundred ninety seven thousand or a total population of fourteen point one seven million in
all the mainstay Pokemon games. Since nineteen hundred people is exactly
0.21% of the population of Alola -and I'm presuming for the sake of simplicity that this percentage of users remains consistent across region- means that
in total, there's approximately twenty nine thousand nine hundred ninety, three people using the payday and happy hour amulet Pokemon genocide method of money-making.
But we're still not done yet because while this is incredibly helpful in figuring out how much money is being created,
it doesn't give us a sense for what the economic impact would be. For that
we need to multiply that GDP per capita out of the gross domestic product per person for each person in each region
According to the GDP of the respective countries with the United States having the highest GDP PC of fifty seven thousand fifteen dollars and sixty
six cents followed by Japan with thirty eight thousand eight hundred eighty nine dollars and seventy six cents and finally France at thirty six thousand
eight hundred forty six dollars and four cents, which when multiplied appropriately,
gives us a total Pokemon GDP of one point eight trillion poka dollars or seven hundred twenty four billion real-world dollars.
Okay, got all that? [confusing bit over]
Need a glass of water? I sure as hell do. All right
Our giant pool of money for the sake of this video is seven hundred and twenty four billion dollars,
but we've got almost thirty thousand people or 0.21% of the population
working eight hours a day five days a week to make the most money they possibly can. Which interestingly it's estimated that approximately
0.33 percent of the population is chasing bitcoins. So this number holds up. So let me kick you a scenario.
You're the first person to discover this Pokédollar printing press method. You start making your thousands every day, and one day
someone is like "Hey, why do you seem so rich all of a sudden?" and you know, she's your best friend,
so you decide what's the harm and telling one person?
So you give her the details and keep on going with your business effectively
printing your own money and all the while the online forums dedicated to Pokédollar mining are starting to stir. Creepy,
scammy companies are starting to form
Suddenly, one year later
Everyone's joining the Hodl gang. Your secret is out,
and now thirty thousand people are murdering psyducks on the daily to increase their Pokemon bank account size so they can creep ever
Closer to that elusive Poké-lambo. Presuming that this method prints money instead of say stealing it from old ladies
a la teleportation, what does this mean?
Inflation. With this many people printing this much money,
you've grown from infusing the market with a mere two million four hundred and thirty five
thousand two hundred and seventy one dollars and ninety cents a year to a
terrifyingly high, seventy five billion nine hundred and sixty four million one hundred and eighty five thousand
and eight dollars and 20 cents per year creating
-get this- an annual inflation rate of ten point four eight percent.
Which is not great
A little inflation is a good thing. the United States Federal Reserve tries to keep it hovering at about three percent each year because
It encourages spending and growth. Ten point four eight percent though would have a pretty negative impact on the economy.
People would want to save money or even borrow money because a hundred dollars that they have in
January would be worth eighty nine dollars and fifty cents in December.
We know for a fact that inflation like this is bad because it's the rate that our country hovered at during several bad
economic crises in the past fifty years. While it likely wouldn't kill people unemployment rates would rise and the government would start
investigating why inflation had creeped so high without their input. "What markets are unmonitored and unregulated," they'd be asking.
(That's a scam!)
And boom suddenly you and your firm of 30,000 people are before a congressional
ethics board, sanctions are being imposed and blam! Payday grinding is outlawed.
Not the greatest outcome, but it's also by far not the worst. The worst thing that happens here is you,
yourself, become the Bernie Madoff or Martin Shkreli of the Pokemon world.
They'd write about you in textbooks for business 101 courses about the dangers of arbitrage chasing. It's not great
but at least you're still alive and maybe you get a killer book deal out of it. The same, however,
cannot be said if payday, instead of acting as a printing press, straight-up
steals money from somewhere. And honestly knowing the way the Pokémon world works, this seems far more likely I mean,
how is a cat or whatever the hell Smeargle is, a Bob Rossian dog?
anyway
How are they capable of straight-up making money out of nowhere? The logistics alone of keeping that much metal stored in their bodies for spontaneous
Synthesis is troubling. Whereas pokeballs and other Pokemon like Abra, Kadabra and
Alakazam have proven that
teleportation and casual quantum entanglement abuse is a regular thing in this universe.
It makes much more sense that those Pokémon are teleporting money out of local cash registers, safes, banks, and
mattresses into their hands to throw at their enemies and holy crap, if this is the case the whole freaking world is screwed
Sure at first
everything's hunky-dory,
but after a few weeks of 30 thousand people effectively stealing money from others the world economy would start to collapse.
I mean just for a reference, the top 0.21% of the wealthy in America
control a little over 11% of the wealth in the country and
Conservatively, it took them like, at least some years to get that wealth- probably decades.
It would take the .21% of Pokemon trainers using these moves
282 days. Just 10 months to be at the same level and it would just go up from there.
I mean, whatever your political leanings, look out your window, look on Twitter things are you know?
Not great right now people are angry
some people want to protect their wealth other people want to redistribute the wealth and we're just here we're right here
where the top .21% controls 11.37% of the wealth!
Can you imagine what it would be like if the .21% controlled, I don't know a quarter of the wealth?
Well less than two years into our scenario,
that's where we are the Pokémon universe.
Half the wealth? Less than three and a half years. By the end of a five year period if this pattern
continued to the top .21% of the wealthy in the Pokémon world, would control almost
3/4s of all the money in existence. There would be an
unstoppable uprising, probably long before
this point. Political inclination would hardly matter because everyone's on the same page when you're starving. Left wing, right wing,
they'd all unite under the banner of cutting your freaking head off so they can afford to eat
Redistribution of wealth wouldn't even be a political policy issue, it'd be the meaning between life and death for 99.79%
of the world population. And once thirty thousand heads rolled, there'd
undoubtedly be bloody civil wars as masses of hungry desperate people with different life
experiences and ideologies fought over how to distribute this money back to the people.
It would be a war with death unlike we've ever
seen. It would be devastating, span entire continents and cost the lives of millions of innocents, all because you
didn't want to work for an honest living so,
sure.
Maybe Pokemon training isn't the best living, but it's a hell of a lot better than
spending your life in prison or millions of people cheering as your head is chopped off. Be safe. Be responsible.
Do not use payday. And,
apparently don't be a Pokémon trainer either, just like..
Be one of those dudes who owns a shop selling Pokéballs to ten-year-olds. It's so much safer
Sincerely, Austin.